Marketing Excellence Centre

The BLS Marketing Excellence Centre is a team of people located around the world with operational experience gained across both developed and maturing markets. We cover the full spectrum of tasks from insight and analytic, to strategy development and commercial planning, and finally the operational execution of campaign portfolios.

Our interventions are varied from small diagnostic projects at one end through to a fully managed service at the other extreme. In every case the programme is tailored specifically to your requirements.

Our MEC programmes are based on the following principles:

‘Keep it Simple’ – We should not over complicate either the initial solution build with data requirements, or the initial phase of campaigns. These should be based on ‘test and learn’ against low volume customer target groups, ideally with straightforward selection and reward and fulfillment solutions. This has numerous advantages such as: decreasing the likelihood of technical holdups, allowing the building of internal confidence around the commercial outcome of CVM activity, simplifying evaluation, and not over stretching the available resources.

‘Act now, and plan for later’ – The imperative to deliver ROI should be driving us to an earliest possible date for automated cyclical campaigns. These are unlikely to generate large commercial returns, but are essential to develop momentum for the programme. This will be largely facilitated by an expert BLS resource working with your teams and focussed on the mechanics of campaign operations. The majority of benefits in the long term and the realisation of your ambitions require business change to process and organisation. This can be overwhelming and requires careful consideration of priorities and opportunities, and may take a long time to come to fruition, but should be kicked off in parallel with campaign operations.

Start soon, finish sooner’ – Linked to ‘act now, plan for later’ the need to build on the momentum already created suggests that the technical go-live of a platform should not be the starting point of CVM engagement and preparation. We recommend starting with a low level of activity as soon as possible, ramping up over time.

‘People, process and platforms’ – Our Marketing Excellence team will work with your internal teams to develop CVM operations – not just limited to the mechanics of campaign operation and evaluation with InTelestageTM. Specifically as part of the ‘plan for later’ approach, we’ll bring our experience in CVM transformation to bear in your organization and help you create a programme for this that can be embraced by all parts of the organization involved.